And By Fire
A Novel
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- 69,99 zł
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- 69,99 zł
Publisher Description
Tempered by fire and separated by centuries, two extraordinary female detectives track a pair of murderous geniuses who will burn the world for their art in this mystery perfect for fans of Sarah Penner and Dan Brown.
Nigella Parker, Detective Inspector with the City Police, has a deeply rooted fear of fire and a talent for solving deadly arson cases. When a charred figure is found curled beside Sir Christopher Wren’s Monument to the Great Fire of London, Nigella is dragged into a case pitting her against a murderous artist creating sculptures using burnt flesh.
Nigella partners with Colm O’Leary of Scotland Yard to track the arsonist across greater London. The pair are more than colleagues—they were lovers until O’Leary made the mistake of uttering three little words. Their past isn’t the only buried history as they race to connect the dots between an antique nail pulled from a dead man’s hands and a long-forgotten architect dwarfed by the life’s work of Sir Christopher Wren.
Wren, one of London’s most famous architects, is everywhere the pair turn. Digging into his legacy leads the DCIs into the coldest of cold cases: a search for a bookseller gone missing during the Great Fire of London. More than 350 years earlier, while looking for their friend, a second pair of detectives—a lady-in-waiting to the Queen and a royal fireworks maker—discovered foul play in the supposedly accidental destruction of St. Paul’s Cathedral…but did that same devilry lead to murder? And can these centuries-old crimes help catch a modern-day murderer?
As Nigella and O’Leary rush to decode clues, past and present, London’s killer-artist sets his sights on a member of the investigative team as the subject of his next fiery masterpiece.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two fire-related mysteries set centuries apart drive this middling double whodunit from Hawtrey (Ribbons of Scarlet as Sophie Perinot). In present-day London, Det. Insp. Nigella Parker, an arson specialist, is assigned to an odd blaze—someone set fire to a wooden figure of a person at the site of a memorial to the Great Fire of London of 1666. Nigella's fears that the vandalism is the precursor to something worse are validated when a burnt corpse, posed as if crucified, is found in the Inner Temple. A necktie bearing the image of St. Paul's Church was bound around its head, with a message written on its back that reads in part: "this fool died for all sinners who mistake celebrity for genius." Meanwhile, in 1666, Queen Catherine Braganza's maid, Margaret Dove, looks into the intriguing, if historically unsupported, theory that the conflagration that gutted the city was set intentionally for a sinister purpose. Neither lead is memorable, and the past story line offers a shocking solution to the fire's origin that will strike many as unpersuasive. This is no An Instance of the Fingerpost.